Video and audio quality in a conference ultimately impacts the user's overall experience and, therefore, whether the conference was successful. The real-time nature of audio and video traffic in a live conference make their management important. Video requires more data and, therefore, is more likely to be impacted by poor quality, especially when bandwidth becomes constrained.
While users may tolerate portions of a video with poor quality, such as video comprising a single person speaking (e.g., a broadcast), other videos require high quality for successfully interactive participation. For example, a video of a surgical procedure may be incomprehensible if fine detail is omitted or if the frame rate drops to the point that subtle actions are omitted. It is also common for a conference to include images of a live presentation, which may include a screen receiving projected images. If those images include graphs, reports, documents, or other finely detailed information, the content may be of little value if the video quality is not sufficient to convey the images in a usable form.
Conference quality can be affected by a number of factors. One of the most important factors is the connection speed of each participant's system and codecs used by each participant. When packets of video conference data drop, the quality of the conference decreases, and the process of resending the packets is not always error-free. However, other areas of creating, transmitting, and receiving teleconferencing can be subject to failure, overloading, misconfiguration, or other issue that resulting in a poor quality conference for one or more participants.